Fixing Event Trigger Corruption

I have been working on my hack for almost 8 months now, and have just now discovered that in the very earliest build of my hack, there was corruption on the event triggers on maps $192 (Ancient Cave Save Point) through $19D (Colosseum) (Note that some of the maps do not have events). I have learned my lesson to never use Zone Doctor ever, EVER again for map edits, but for now, I'm just looking for how to fix it. The event triggers themselves have no changes, so just copying a block of hex from an uncorrupted rom should do it. Where do I find the offsets for those events?

ROM map: https://www.ff6hacking.com/wiki/doku.php...sm:rom_map

If you did not add or remove event triggers or modified some, I would copy the pointers + event triggers so the $C40000-$C41A0F block. Send me your archive when you're done so I can update it on the server.

What do you mean "Send me your archive"? Do you mean the Divergent Paths IPS? I have one more thing I need to update on that before I can send it. LeetSkeetcher let me know that you actually CAN re-do the Lete River portion, which I hadn't known. I had not taken that into account when I programmed my event.

But the "Thank You" I sent is a bit under-stated on this one. To find that the rom you've been working on for 8 months is uncompletable and unfixable using existing editors... if I couldn't have fixed this via hex editing, I might have given up romhacking today. Thankfully, I was able drop in the lines that appear to have been corrupted. Let's cross our fingers and hope that I didn't overwrite other data in the process.

EDIT: Rom will load and play from Savestate, but it will not boot. I'll figure this out later... going to bed for now.

What do you mean "Send me your archive"? Do you mean the Divergent Paths IPS?

Yes I meant the zip archive.

Well, I've done an in-depth analysis, and have found out that using Zone Doctor to make ANY map edits will corrupt the event trigger data for maps $18F (Cid's Island, Cliff) through $19D (Colosseum). Specifically, it adds in junk data starting at C40402, which means there is not enough room for the final bank of event triggers. If you manually copy/paste the remaining data in starting at C41A10, you overwrite some of the data the game needs to boot to the title screen. Note: if you skip the title screen and load from a savestate, all of the event triggers work properly, so it IS reading the data.

For my test, I used Zone Doctor CE to shift the y-coordinates of a single event trigger up by one, then examined the rom in a hex editor. It had added in all of the junk data.

There is currently no fix that I can determine from this, short of copying in the data from an untouched rom, then going back through FF6LE and making edits to the event triggers of every single map I touched. However, I also suspect that NPC and Treasure Data was affected as well, so I'd probably be better off starting with an untouched rom, re-making my map edits in FF6LE, using FF3usME to import my script changes, and then using a hex editor to copy over the event script changes. It's... going to take a while. A LONG while with a new baby in the house.

Very sorry to hear about this. A long long time ago I had to transfer my hack over to a clean ROM once thanks to the infamous FF3 Edit, and it did take a few days... BUT, trust me it will go much faster than the first time as you are experienced with the utilities and your work, can dump the dialog script etc. It would go faster than you might think at first, oh, but yeah having a new baby in the house -might- just slow things down a bit lol.

But yeah man, it's so worth it just to not have to deal with Zone Doctor's shortcomings...
Godspeed!

For my test, I used Zone Doctor CE to shift the y-coordinates of a single event trigger up by one, then examined the rom in a hex editor. It had added in all of the junk data.

Zone Doctor CE is no different from Zone Doctor regarding the instability it has and corruption it can lead to. I only added the expansion feature I had done in FF6LE Rogue CE. I have put extra warnings on the utility page on the wiki regarding Zone Doctor.

There is currently no fix that I can determine from this, short of copying in the data from an untouched rom, then going back through FF6LE and making edits to the event triggers of every single map I touched. However, I also suspect that NPC and Treasure Data was affected as well, so I'd probably be better off starting with an untouched rom, re-making my map edits in FF6LE, using FF3usME to import my script changes, and then using a hex editor to copy over the event script changes. It's... going to take a while. A LONG while with a new baby in the house.

This is probably the good decision. I also noticed with the Lunar IPS report that your hack had a lot of event changes, I'm not sure if all those were intentional or if the event editor reorganized a lot of stuff. By a lot I mean more changes than a hack like this would require.

Divergent Paths edited around 10 percent of all total scenes, so that may be accurate. Even if all I did in a scene was rearrange 1 byte, an ips would have to change ALL bytes to accommodate the shift. All that to say I think we're okay with events.

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For posterity's sake, I have confirmed that treasure and exit data is uncorrupted. NPCs start getting corrupted only on the final map, $19D - The Colosseum. All 13 are corrupted. Just like the event triggers, these spill over into the next set of data, and cannot be manually corrected.

how many roms will have to perish before people will stop using Zone Doctor? (and using LE instead, for god's sake)

how many roms will have to perish before people will stop using Zone Doctor? (and using LE instead, for god's sake)

I have added "this editor will likely corrupt your ROM" on the wiki utility page and removed Zone Doctor CE from the main downloads. If you want Zone Doctor CE you have to go on the Zone Doctor page and don't take in account the tip "since no bug were fixed on the CE version it is highly recommended to use FF6LE Rogue CE". I did my best, there's nothing more I can do except remove Zone Doctor altogether but I'm not doing it for the same reason FF3Edit is on RHDN.